plugin

Sep

2010

Big Ed – An Introduction

Update: The Big Ed Nickel Sale is now live and you can get to it here:-

***

Tomorrow, 16th September, I’m going to run a nickel sale for my latest WordPress plugin.

My wife took one look at it and said “Ooh! I WANT that on my blogs!” and I think you will too.

There’s not been a lot of notice for this nickel sale I know, and I’ve been keeping this “under my hat”, but it’s now all done and I’d like to get it out there right away. (And I like to reward those people who pay attention to what I’m doing by giving them the best possible price.)

This new plugin adds additional features to the built in TinyMCE editor that comes with WordPress, and we’ve nicknamed it “Big Ed”. 😉

Apart from expanding the capabilities of the default WordPress editor, we’ve also added a few extra features that we’re very confident you’ll find incredibly useful.

And while it sounds innocent enough, wait until you see what it can do.

By default, the buttons you get with the WordPress editor look like this:-

And you can also then press the “Kitchen Sink” button to get some additional toolbar buttons:-

So that your toolbar would then look like this with the other buttons enabled:-

Now what happens when you install and activate Big Ed?

Well… You get to see this:-

You might have seen something like this before, and there are other plugins that do a similar thing, but we went a step further and added some very special formatting tools.

For instance, now you can add three new styles to your posts in the form of Johnson boxes, graphical bullets, and graphical separators.

First, here’s an example of one of the Johnson box styles you can add. We’ve included a selection in a mix of styles and widths, making 9 altogether. This isn’t a screenshot you’re looking at, this is the plugin in action and the text in this box is selectable – try it.

Next, how about some separators? There are 10 in 3 different widths making 30 altogether. Here are some examples…

First, Green Shade:-

Next, Dashed Blue:-

And now Dotted Red:-

Finally, how about some graphical bullets? There are 6 different bullet styles you can use.

Bullet.
Bullet.
Bullet.

And here’s another example of bullets.

Bullet.
Bullet.
Bullet.

And some more.

Bullet.
Bullet.
Bullet.

In time we’ll add some more styles to the plugin, but I’m sure you can see there’s a very nice selection available already.

Okay, that’s enough detail for now.

Tomorrow (16th September) at 6.00pm GMT (1.00pm EST) I’ll be running a nickel sale for this plugin, starting at just $6.97.

Just in case you don’t know what a nickel sale is, it’s a rising price sale where the price increases by a small amount – in this case a nickel. The sooner you buy, the lower the price. If you wait too long before purchasing and decide to buy later you might find that it’s then twice the price it was when you looked at it earlier.

A starting price of $6.97 means the first 20 buyers will get it at under $8.00. The first people to buy get the better deal, and typically the first 100 sales occur in the first hour.

-Frank Haywood

P.S. If you’re not sure of the time zone I’m in and you want to check the time here, you can see the current time in my time zone (GMT) underneath the photo of me in the sidebar.

Sep

2010

Why Do You Like WordPress?

If you’re a regular reader of this blog, then you can’t have failed to notice how many WordPress based products I’ve been putting out recently, and that’s simply because…

I really like WordPress.

In the last 12 months, WordPress has really come on in leaps and bounds. In fact 12 months ago I certainly wouldn’t have described it as a CMS, but I would now even though it’s lacking a good implementation of one important feature that all good Content Management Systems should have – journaling. (The WordPress dev team have sort of paid it a little lip service by introducing multiple draft copies, but I don’t think that really counts.)

But in spite of that, like I said I really like it.

And the main reason for that is it’s dead easy to install.

If you have cPanel hosting, then you’ve probably also got Fantastico too. And if you have that, it takes 2 minutes or less to install WordPress.

Once WordPress is installed, then apart from all the usual stuff people will swoon over it for (extensibility and free stuff), there’s one very important aspect which gets overlooked by just about everybody:-

It reveals another layer of ease of use with regards to installing scripts.

If you’ve ever installed a standalone PHP script with a MySQL database, then you’ve probably found it can be a little tricky sometimes. Especially if you don’t know what you’re doing.

You have to upload files, you sometimes have to CHMOD stuff, you have to create the database and add a user with the correct permissions to it, then run the installer and enter the database details, and that’s even before you get to any of the real configuration stuff in the scripts admin panel.

A standalone script installation can take anything from 15 minutes to an hour, which is why some people pay others to do it for them.

But with WordPress…

You just upload the plugin using either FTP or the built in WordPress file browser and activate it.

Again, a 2 minute job.

No messing with config files, creating databases etc, you just upload and activate. The plugins will use the existing WordPress database, and you don’t have to be really technically minded to do it either.

So in under 5 minutes you can install WordPress and have a script running on it. Another 5-10 minutes depending on the complexity and you’ve amended all the settings in the admin panel.

I feel it’s important at this point to say that I’m not talking about plugins that do stuff that’s unique to WordPress, I mean plugins that will do vital stuff for your business like run a sales script or affiliate scheme or autoresponder.

Tasks that would traditionally be done by either a service or a standalone script.

And THAT is why I like WordPress so much.

It makes things so much easier and simpler to do.

Why do you like WordPress?

-Frank Haywood

Aug

2010

Slide Up Ads Plugin Pre-order

My new Slide Up Ads plugin is now available on pre-order for just $10.

There are 100 copies available at this price. It was going to be 50, but after chatting with a friend I thought they might sell out a little too quickly.

What’s this all about?

When I introduced a slide up ads script to this blog, I immediately saw an increase in the number of subscribers. The sign up rate jumped from 1 in 17 visitors to 1 in every 7.

It was actually a 249% increase, and that figure has never changed – I still get 1 in 7 visitors sign up.

I give away a script and a report. The report has my affiliate links in and I make money from it – in fact I made at least $150 last month directly as a result of that report alone, and that was just two sales of a product I’m an affiliate for. I haven’t bothered to check for any other money I made from it, but there are continuity items in there too, so I’m earning from those as well.

So not only am I building a mailing list of subscribers, I’m also making money without doing anything other than I would do anyway – it really is passive income.

I’ll just repeat what I said in my email yesterday as I think it really hammers home the situation:-

For every 10 new subscribers you’ve been picking up from visitors to your sites, then suddenly you can push that number up to 25 from the same amount of visitors just by using this plugin.

Considering the industry standard rate that a subscriber to your mailing list can mean up to a dollar a month in income, then you have to ask yourself just what are you losing by not using it?

The plugin is about 10 days from completion and will come with a nice selection of slide up graphics plus the ability to set the slide up delay and the number of times it’s displayed.

Today I’m making available 100 copies on pre-order for just $10. When they’re gone, I’ll pull the plug until I officially release it (probably $27, maybe $37).

PLEASE remember to bookmark your personal download page after purchase, and PLEASE sign up to the mailing list on that page – it’s a list for customers of that product only and we use it to let you know when we release upgrades. Your name and email address are pre-filled, all you have to do is click the button, check your email and click the link in there to confirm.

You can be one of the first 100 people to own it (and at only $10) by using the buy link below.

Update: Offer now closed.

-Frank Haywood

Aug

2010

Free SMTP Plugin – I Could Kick Myself…

UPDATE: I sent an email out yesterday evening (13th) with a link to the free plugin, so go check your email. This was a thank you to subscribers only, and I won’t be posting the link to it here on the blog.

***

It’s FREE plugin time.

It can’t have escaped your attention as to how much of my attention I’m investing in WordPress at the moment.

While not perfect for your needs, it does make it easy to set up a site quickly. And of course there are all those free plugins – 99% of which are junk in a business context – to help you do so.

One of the things that’s always been an issue for me is email deliverability. i.e. You send an email, but does it ever get there? Who knows? That’s why I use a third party mailing service in some instances.

But getting your emails delivered isn’t really rocket science, you just need to take a little care. For instance enabling Domain Keys and SPF in cPanel will help in both directions – both sending and receiving email – and takes about 2 minutes to do.

And of course, always making sure that if you’re using a script on one of your sites that it uses SMTP to send the email. That really helps as many ISPs and email providers will filter out email as it comes into their network if they can see it hasn’t been sent via SMTP when they examine the email headers.

What we’ve been doing in creating scripts and plugins here is to make sure they all have SMTP support to aid in deliverability, and this seems to work well.

In the case of WordPress we’ve been building the SMTP functionality into the plugins themselves. Which is great, but…

Well. You know how you sometimes have one of those OMG moments and you get a little revelation? And then you feel like kicking yourself for not having realised it before? I had one of those about a month ago.

I thought…

“Why on earth are we adding SMTP code into every plugin? Why not just write a plugin that intercepts all email sends and make sure it goes via SMTP?”

Of course! That would work. I had a look round at existing plugins and it seems that I’ve been beaten to it. So I took a look and immediately thought we could do better, and that’s exactly what we’ve done.

We’ve taken the idea of sending emails via SMTP and gone a step further. We’ve added the ability to throttle and queue emails.

You see the problem is, many web hosts and ISPs are very aware of the amount of spam being sent and to limit this, they only allow a certain number of emails to be sent per hour or per day from each domain or account. Anything over your quota is discarded.

So while you may think you’ve just sent 800 emails out with your desktop app or a web application such as WordPress AutoResponder (WPAR), most of them have been discarded even before they’ve left the network. Oh dear. 🙁

This new FREE plugin addresses that problem.

Once activated, you enter your SMTP settings and your web host quota (e.g. 200/hour), and that’s it. From that point on any email sent via WordPress either through a contact form, or a comment update plugin or WPAR will be pushed into a queue, and if available to be sent will do so there and then.

If the queue is greater than your quota, then the new email waits until the next send and then out it goes if there’s a slot available.

Cool huh?

We’re just doing final test and fix today, and if all is well hopefully it will be out to you tomorrow.

***

While you’re reading this, I’d also like to just do a quick mention of another plugin that’s almost complete called “Widget Contexts”. This is the final of the trio of what I think of as the control plugins.

The first was “Ads Manager” which allows you to display ads depending on lots of different rules you can set.

The second was “Widgets In It” which allows you to place any widget into any post or page, not just in a sidebar.

This final control plugin “Widget Contexts” allows you to decide which widgets will appear on which parts of your site.

When activated it adds to the bottom of every plugin an auto-generated selection of “contexts” and tick boxes to decide where you want the widget to appear.

That might sound a bit complicated but it’s very easy to use in practice.

For instance you may decide you only want to show a certain widget on a particular page on your site. All you do is untick every other page within the widget context.

Or you may decide that you want to place different ads on special pages such as your 404, category archives and tag archive pages.

Easy! Just create the ad using either a text widget or Ads Manager, and then only select the special pages you want them to appear on.

There’s good reasons for wanting this level of control, and I’ll explain why in another post. 😉

***

Right!

While we’re waiting for Widget Contexts to be finalised and tested, probably by the end of the week, you can have a play with the free SMTP Throttler, so watch out for that announcement tomorrow. 😉

-Frank Haywood

Aug

2010

48 Hour Special – Second Multiple Streams Theme

The second Multiple Streams Theme for business and pro bloggers is now available again for 48 hours-ish, closing on Tuesday at 9.00pm EST.

It’s priced at just $17 for the duration of this special offer. After that the price will rise ($27) while we set up the official site, and then eventually rise one more time to its regular price.

But until 9.00pm EST on Tuesday 3rd August, you can get it for just $17.

I know that when the pre-order offer closed a few days ago that some people missed it and were upset. I’m sorry about that, but there’s a LOT of work going into these themes and any discounted offer like this is a good one and worth every penny.

We will also only be selling 200 copies in total, and the first batch of 68 (I intended 50 but I let the pre-order run a little longer) have already quickly gone on pre-order, leaving 132 copies.

(If you don’t yet have the first Multiple Streams Theme, there are about 20 of the original 200 remaining.)

And just like the original theme, we wanted to make sure it was as flexible as possible, so we also included the Ads Manager plugin – it’s incredibly powerful.

When you see how it can display or suppress ads on your site, you’ll be blown away at how useful it is as Ads Manager allows you to only suppress or display ads to visitors based on rules you select or create.

You can do things like only show a particular ad to visitors who have come from search engines. Or only show the ad on posts that are more than 2 weeks old.

And just to really give you some power over how and when your ads are displayed, we also included WordPress Conditional Tags as one of the rules you can set. There are a LOT of tags that can be used and you’ll find out where to find them in the included mst-readme.txt inside the zip.

So for example, you could add is_front_page() to the conditional tags box and your visitors would only see the ad on the front page of your blog.

Or you could add is_single() and your visitors would only see the ad on a post and not on your front page, or you could use is_page() and the ad would only appear on pages, and so on. You can even specify individual posts and pages, or put another way, the Ads Manager plugin enables you to show different ads on different posts and pages.

It gives you almost total control over your ads and it’s PERFECT for use with the Multiple Streams Themes.

Here are the key points of the second Multiple Streams Themes:-

o Designed to provide you multiple income streams.
o Only 200 copies will ever be sold.
o Multi-site usage licence for sites you personally own.
o Supplied with “Ads Manager” plugin for full control of your ads.
o Carefully placed subscriber sign up box in the “Golden Triangle”.
o Latest posts at a glance.
o Featured freebie.
o Time sensitive offers.
o Product spotlight.
o New releases.
o THIRTEEN sidebars giving you increased flexibility of ad placement.
o Ready made sidebar ads for your affiliate links.
o Sidebar ads are editable.
o Full WordPress 3.0 Custom Menus support.
o Ideal for use with the “Subscribers Only” plugin.
o Ideal for use with the “Widgets In It” plugin.
o Ideal for use with the “WordPress AutoResponder” plugin.

The theme has been designed with you in mind and allows you to create a blog where you can build your mailing list (vital), review products, and also promote multiple products as an affiliate.

Just like the first theme, it’s been designed to make your life easier.

You can view it installed and active on the Multiple Streams Themes site here:-

http://multiplestreamsthemes.com/

You can purchase the theme for just $17 in this 48 hour special using the button below:-

-Frank Haywood